February 1994

Such threats, NSF noted in announcing the latest round of grants, occurs across all geographic regions, at all levels of life, and on scales ranging from the microscopic to the oceanic. "We're gradually evolving a broader concept of ecosystems," says Joann Roskoski, acting deputy director for NSF's division of environmental biology. The division usually approves between 15 and 18 projects each year and has so far doled out about $1

Bench scientists, along with antivivisectionists, wonder what an updated `bible' of animal care will bring Earlier this month, a National Research Council (NRC) committee held the last of three public forums to gather input for a revision of its widely influential Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Although publication of the new guide is not expected until next year, scientists and animal protectionists already are

Observers see organizational and budgetary challenges as potential impediments to office's effectiveness A year after former director John H. Gibbons's departure to become White House science adviser, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is going through a difficult period of transition, reorganization, and budgetary belt- tightening. Editor's Note: Office of Technology Assessment director Roger Herdman discuss

New committee says paper collections are threatened, but librarians say that the information glut demands new acquisitions strategies A committee of more than 130 scientists from different disciplines--newly organized by a consultant with longstanding ties to several commercial academic publishers- -is calling for more federal funding for research libraries. Increasingly, they say, libraries are failing to keep collections of sci

The Whitaker Foundation, headquartered in Washington D.C., has presented 14 Special Opportunity Awards in biomedical engineering to teams of investigators who have come up with proposals to establish novel training programs in the field. The awards range from $250,000 to $750,000. The foundation recognizes that the field of bioengineering is a meeting place for many different disciplines. Medical sciences such as physiology and pha

Editor's Note: On Feb. 1, 1944, the Journal of Experimental Medicine published a scientific paper entitled "Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types." Coauthored by Rockefeller Institute (now University) Hospital researchers Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, the paper--preceding by a decade the Nobel Prize- winning revelations of James Watson and Francis Crick--des

On the subject of animal experimentation (D. Hubel, "Animal Rights Movement Threatens Progress Of U.S. Medical Research," The Scientist, Nov. 15, 1993, page 11), it is worth mentioning that researchers at the Keio University of Tokyo have recently developed a silicon model of a rat, designed to save lives of research animals. This model has both artificial intestines and blood vessels and is well suited for use in student laboratory

Perhaps it should be added that the American Institute of Nutrition (AIN), alone among societies that are members of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), has a Committee on the History of Nutrition, and also has published a two-volume, 1,162-page compilation of the biographies of 128 Founders of Nutrition Science, retrieved from their publication in the Journal of Nutrition over the past 62 years.

In response to a commentary by Frederick K. Goodwin and Adrian R. Morrison ("In Animal Rights Debate, The Only Valid Moderates Are Researchers," The Scientist, Sept. 6, 1993, page 12), Neal D. Barnard states that he has been misinterpreted in regard to his statements about animal experimentation (Letters, The Scientist, Nov. 15, 1993, page 12). No one has been misinterpreting Barnard's stand on animal experimentation, as his positi

When The Scientist first appeared in late 1986, it did so under the aegis of the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information. I founded ISI in 1954, and over the years it has become known and respected as the publisher of Current Contents and the supplier of other products, such as the Science Citation Index. These services provide researchers with timely, comprehensive data on the publishing achievements of their peers

On Dec. 31, 1993, the last stores of the smallpox (variola) virus were to be destroyed simultaneously in Russia and the United States, according to an agreement arranged through the World Health Organization (WHO). If the agreement had been effected, it would have been the first intentional destruction of a human disease and its causative organism. The date has passed, however, and the stores remain intact. But researchers through

S. Matsuda, H. Kosako, K. Takenaka, K. Moriyama, H. Sakai, T. Akiyama, Y. Gotoh, E. Nishida, "Xenopus MAP kinase activator: identification and function as a key intermediate in the phosphorylation cascade," The EMBO Journal, 11:973-82, 1992. Eisuke Nishida (Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Institute for Virus Research, Kyoto University, Japan): "MAP kinases have been described as serine/threonine kinases that are acti

M. Pagano, G. Draetta, P. Jansen-Durr, "Association of cdk2 kinase with the transcription factor E2F during S phase," Science, 255:1144-7, 1992. M. Pagano, R. Pepperkok, F. Verde, W. Ansorge, G. Draetta, "Cyclin A is required at two points in the human cell cycle," EMBO Journal, 11:961-71, 1992. Giulio F. Draetta (Mitotix Inc., Cambridge, Mass.): "The ordered progression of a eukaryotic cell through the cell cycle is absolutely r

D.G. Higgins, A.J. Bleasby, R. Fuchs, "CLUSTAL V: improved software for multiple sequence alignment," Computer Applications in the Biosciences, 8:189-191, 1992. Des Higgins (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany): "CLUSTAL V is derived from an earlier set of programs (Clustal 1,2,3, and 4) that I wrote in Paul Sharp's laboratory in Dublin. This package was designed to allow molecular biologists to take a set o

In just the past few years, technical advances have made possible laser-scanning confocal microscopes able to produce kinetic images of living cells. Depending on the system, neuroscientists and other researchers now can capture images at up to video rates--30 frames per second--or, sometimes, faster. Additionally, they can record those images digitally, or with a video recorder, or with a 35 mm camera. They can view cell events on